2017 College Football Preseason Rankings: Who’s #3?

August 25, 2017 - by David Hess

Here are the official TeamRankings 2017 college football preseason rankings, including the TR Preseason Top 25.

A Quick Primer On Our College Football Preseason Rankings

Our 2017 college football preseason rankings are almost entirely data-driven. We’ve used team data from past seasons to find which descriptive statistics have correlated strongly with high end-of-season power ratings. We then used those stats to create a model that predicts a team’s power rating.

Some examples of data points used in the model include:

“Percentage of prior season performance returning” stats
Prior season final turnover margin
End of season team power rating from the last few years

We assign each input factor a weight based on its demonstrated level of predictive power.

The output is a power rating that represents how many points above or below average we think a team is, with 0.0 representing a “perfectly average” team.

Gut-Checking The Initial Preseason Ratings

Once we generate initial ratings, we we then check them against the betting markets and the human polls.

If our ranking for a team seems severely out of whack with those other sources, we’ll investigate. We check to see if there’s some factor that’s not taken into account by our model, that human voters and the betting market are picking up on. In some cases, we’ll manually adjust our rating to be a bit closer to the consensus. Though only rarely will we adjust it all the way to match the consensus.

Once we’ve got our final ratings, we simply sort to get our 2017 college football preseason rankings.

It’s worth noting that these preseason ratings also drive our college football season projections — at least before the season begins. As the 2017 season progresses, the impact of these preseason ratings will gradually fade, and actual game results will play a larger role in determining our team power ratings (which continue to drive the season projections).

2017 College Football Preseason Rankings Highlights

Top two. In our preseason rankings from 2016 were five teams clustered near the top of the rankings, with no teams head and shoulders above the crowd. This year is completely different. #1 Alabama and #2 Ohio State are well clear of the field. Ohio State is 4.0 points ahead of #3 Florida State; that’s roughly the same as the 4.1-point gap between #3 Florida and #11 LSU. In other words, there’s Alabama & Ohio State at the top, and then there’s everybody else.

In our Top 25 but not the AP’s. Three teams in the TR Preseason Top 25 did not rank in the AP’s version:

TCU (#18 TR, #26 AP)
Notre Dame (#22 TR, #28 AP)
Georgia Tech (#25 TR, no votes in the AP)

We like ’em better than the AP does. Other teams we ranked higher than the AP voters include:

Oklahoma (#4 TR, #7 AP)
Auburn (#7 TR, #12 AP)

In the AP Top 25 but not ours. Three teams in the AP Preseason Top 25 didn’t make our list:

Tennessee (#26 TR, #25 AP)
Virginia Tech (#30 TR, #21 AP)
West Virginia (#38 TR, #22 AP)

The AP likes ’em better than we do. Other teams we ranked lower than the AP voters did include:

USC (#8 TR, #4 AP)
Penn State (#9 TR, #6 AP)
Wisconsin (#14 TR, #9 AP)
Oklahoma State (#15 TR, #10 AP)
South Florida (#24 TR, #19 AP)

An Open Letter To Crazy Hardcore Fan Of Team X

Dear Hardcore Fan Of Team X,

Before you make an enraged comment about where we’ve ranked your beloved alma mater and call us a bunch of mouth-breathing Harambe haters who eat their mac and cheese with a spoon, please keep two things in mind:

We use a systematic approach to rank all 130 teams. Our approach has done very well over the years when measured by the most important yardstick: the overall accuracy of projecting team performance levels in the upcoming season across the entire system of 130 teams. It’s also going to get plenty of individual teams wrong, and some very wrong, for all sorts of reasons.
Look at ratings, not just rankings. For example, only 0.2 points separates the #6 team (Washington) from the #9 team (Penn State). Those four teams are all very close to being equals. Often times, the distinction between two closely ranked teams is essentially negligible, so it’s not even worth debating.

Glossary

Team ratings are expressed as points better (positive rating) or worse (negative rating) than the average FBS team, when playing on a neutral field
A positive “TR Delta” means we gave a team a better ranking than the AP; a negative TR Delta means we gave it a worse ranking than the AP
If you’re still curious to learn more about our college football preseason rankings in general, check out our 2012 post covering college football rankings components

Official 2017 College Football Preseason Rankings

TR Rank	AP Rank	TR Delta	Team	Rating
1	1		Alabama	25.7
2	2		Ohio St	24.5
3	3		Florida St	20.5
4	7	+3	Oklahoma	19.9
5	5		Clemson	17.4
6	8	+2	Washington	17.2
7	12	+5	Auburn	17.2
8	4	-4	USC	17.0
9	6	-3	Penn St	17.0
10	14	+4	Stanford	16.5
11	13	+2	LSU	16.4
12	16	+4	Louisville	16.3
13	11	-2	Michigan	15.4
14	9	-5	Wisconsin	15.0
15	10	-5	Oklahoma St	13.3
16	20	+4	Kansas St	12.4
17	15	-2	Georgia	11.4
18	26	+8	TCU	11.3
19	18	-1	Miami, FL	10.7
20	17	-3	Florida	10.6
21	24	+3	Washington St	9.9
22	28	+6	Notre Dame	9.7
23	23		Texas	9.7
24	19	-5	USF	9.2
25	NR	+??	Georgia Tech	9.0
26	25	-1	Tennessee	8.9
27			Texas A&M	8.8
28			NC State	8.8
29			Northwestern	8.1
30	21	-9	Virginia Tech	8.0
31			UCLA	7.9
32			Houston	7.8
33			Utah	7.4
34			Iowa	7.1
35			Oregon	6.9
36			Missouri	6.8
37			Arkansas	6.6
38	22	-16	West Virginia	6.5
39			Baylor	6.2
40			Colorado	6.1
41			Memphis	5.8
42			Mississippi St	5.7
43			Vanderbilt	5.5
44			Boise St	5.5
45			Ole Miss	5.5
46			Pittsburgh	5.5
47			WKU	5.2
48			Kentucky	5.1
49			Navy	4.4
50			Duke	4.2
51			North Carolina	4.0
52			Minnesota	3.8
53			Arizona St	3.5
54			BYU	3.4
55			San Diego St	3.4
56			Toledo	3.1
57			Western Michigan	2.3
58			Indiana	2.2
59			Michigan St	2.2
60			Appalachian St	1.6
61			Oregon St	1.5
62			Arizona	1.2
63			Wake Forest	1.1
64			Nebraska	0.9
65			Colorado St	0.7
66			Texas Tech	0.7
67			Syracuse	0.7
68			UCF	0.0
69			Temple	-0.5
70			South Carolina	-0.6
71			Tulsa	-0.7
72			Boston College	-0.9
73			Maryland	-1.3
74			Iowa St	-1.6
75			Army	-1.6
76			Troy	-2.0
77			Virginia	-2.4
78			California	-3.8
79			Northern Illinois	-4.4
80			Utah St	-4.6
81			Air Force	-5.0
82			Wyoming	-5.0
83			Georgia Southern	-5.5
84			Louisiana Tech	-5.7
85			Middle Tennessee	-6.3
86			Southern Miss	-6.7
87			Marshall	-6.7
88			Tulane	-6.8
89			Arkansas St	-6.8
90			East Carolina	-6.9
91			Cincinnati	-6.9
92			New Mexico	-7.5
93			SMU	-7.9
94			Ball St	-8.1
95			Purdue	-8.3
96			Illinois	-8.4
97			Ohio	-8.5
98			Bowling Green	-8.7
99			Central Michigan	-9.0
100			UTSA	-9.0
101			Connecticut	-9.3
102			Akron	-9.7
103			Rutgers	-10.0
104			Miami, OH	-10.3
105			Old Dominion	-10.4
106			Florida Atlantic	-10.7
107			Nevada	-10.9
108			UNLV	-11.0
109			UL Lafayette	-11.4
110			Eastern Michigan	-11.5
111			Hawaii	-11.8
112			San Jose St	-11.9
113			Fresno St	-12.3
114			Rice	-12.6
115			Kent St	-12.6
116			Kansas	-12.7
117			ULM	-13.2
118			Coasta Carolina	-13.2
119			FIU	-13.5
120			Georgia St	-13.8
121			Massachusetts	-13.8
122			UAB	-14.6
123			South Alabama	-14.6
124			Idaho	-15.5
125			North Texas	-16.2
126			Buffalo	-17.0
127			UTEP	-17.8
128			Charlotte	-19.6
129			New Mexico St	-21.2
130			Texas St	-22.7